Where Miss Snark vented her wrath on the hapless world of writers and crushed them to sand beneath her T.Rexual heels of stiletto snark. The blog is dark--no further updates after 5/20/2007.

12.30.2006

Hh Com 631

He likes to remember that she was the first thing he saw on his first morning. Years later, when he finally makes his peace with everything that follows, that is still what he remembers.

He savours that first morning's impressions of the walk through campus on a late September day, the sun determined but failing, making him squint but not warm. He tries to know it for what it is: a significant day, a day that will change his life. The building emerges majestically from behind trees and he tries to appreciate it properly; it will be his home from home for three years; it's nearly two hundred years old; it has produced one Nobel Prize winner and any number of other startlingly successful scientists from its ranks. He tries to breathe in the privilege and entitlement that are now his, and all he gets is the fading hint of smoke as the girl on the step throws the butt of her cigarette in a bored arc across his path and into a flower bed. She continues to lean against the heavy wood of the door as though she has nowhere better to be, although the lab coat she wears might suggest this is not the case, and she contemplates him with much the same interest as she has the butt.

This isn't a hook, it's an opening paragraph. There's no hook or twist as there was in the earlier example wherein a first page DID work as a hook. This is just description.